Adult learning is more than alternative education, self-help, self-study, or training. Self-directed inquiry can free you from the cultural traps of today’s postmodern world. When you think for yourself, you take control of your life. Intellectual ability and critical thinking soon become substitutes for paper credentials. Simply stated aggressive learning is the most practical guide to a passionately rewarding life.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Free Riders, Parasites: Perspective

Contempt for free riders—people
who cheat or who game the system by taking more than their share of anything in
short supply—is an innate human trait that appears to be deeply imbedded in our
DNA. We witness the same sentiment in our primate cousins. Give one chimpanzee
a plum and another a grape, and the chimp that feels cheated is apt to throw a
fit. In our own society it seems the most effective free riders are found, not
at the bottom economic rungs of society, but at the top. I will explain.

Equity and fairness are
human aspirations, and achieving fairness requires constant mediation. Capitalism
as an ideology is often revered as a system so righteous and so inherently just
that its most fervent supporters consider capitalism the essence of the natural
world, something very nearly divine in its operative value. But divinity in Nature
is a difficult notion. Life eats.

The biological forces of the
earth’s living creatures are so complex in predator-prey relationships that we
have barely begun to understand the extent of their ecological impact. By human
standards, cruelty in the natural world is both hideous and ubiquitous, while Nature
is morally indifferent.

On television we witness
lions on the Serengeti Plain eating large game animals, feasting slowly even
while the prey remains alive. In the insect world, scores of parasites consume their
hosts carefully so as to keep them alive to ensure a continuous supply of future
meals. Some insects take prisoners, keeping slaves for food or labor. Some bird
species lay their eggs in the nests of another, tricking those species into
raising their young. The cleverness of the natural world is as astounding as it
is amoral, and deceit is one of Nature’s most ingenious schemes.

Even though we human
beings are regarded asthe most
sophisticated creatures on the planet, our behavior in general is fairly predictable.
We operate pretty much as Abraham Maslow said we do. We experience a hierarchy
of needs from basic food, shelter, safety, and security, to social acceptance, and
ending with what Maslow called self-actualization.

Now, if a team of alien
anthropologists were to visit our planet and spend most of their time America, it’s
easy to see how they might be fascinated by our behavior and how they might
mistakenly assume that every country in the world lives as we do. I suspect these
explorers would quickly observe that by orders of magnitude human beings depend
more upon trickery to function in the world than do any of the earth’s less intelligent
creatures. One can imagine the visitors returning to their own planet thinking
that what they had discovered was a celestial body full of swindlers,
tricksters, cheats, opportunists, and advantage-seeking individuals.

The observers would be
surprised that an extraordinarily large percentage of Americans are in prison,
but that the slickest white-collar thieves get much better treatment, even
though the costs exacted by their crimes are astronomical.

The team would also note
that we are intensely social creatures and that without extensive cooperation,
our species would not survive. So perhaps they would think of us as being
gregarious but not entirely trustworthy. If the aliens belonged to an advanced
civilization, I suspect they would find our deviousness very clever but also frightening
and inconsistent with logic, since our losses often outweigh what we gain by
illicit deception.

Our visitors would likely
note that our species even admits that its marvelous brain development has been
more dependent upon acquiring the ability to outfox one another than on learning
the truth of anything. We are so psychologically insecure that we are easily
manipulated in spite of our devious predilections. If we are judged by
standards we deem unfair, it still won’t stop us from applying the same values
to ourselves and others. Moreover, with regard to the environment, our guests
would likely perceive that humans readily sell out their long-term future for
short-term gains.

So the extraterrestrials
return home and deliver a report on our species saying, “You are not going to
believe this. The earth is a cesspool of deceit and skullduggery. We saw
evidence of cooperation and love and kindness as well, but on the whole, these
creatures are too immature to be trusted with the advanced weaponry their
formidable technology has produced. If the rest of the people on earth were to
use and waste resources as those who call themselves Americans do, they would
need four more planets.

“In addition, there are large
numbersof earth creatures whose
lives are spent being preyed upon by parasites. And that’s the most interesting
aspect of the whole trip. The beings that call themselves human are so
emotionally unstable and insecure that the individuals who are often thought to
be successful are actually effective parasitical predators. They emulate
bloodsuckers in a deceitful but ingenious manner.

“They cloak themselves as
employers dedicated to providing a public service, referring to themselves as ‘job
creators.’ They pay their employees
just enough to keep them low on a needs hierarchy defined by a psychologist
named Maslow.They live lavish
lifestyles while bleeding their workers of their labor, robbing them of their time,
and causing them to view themselves as unworthy of being attributed the dignity
that any civilized society would grant to human beings.

“From birth, these ideological
captives are indoctrinated to ignore the unfairness of the rigged economic
system they are part of, adopting the notion that they are fully responsible
for their own poverty, unjust system be damned.

“Seriously, fellow space travelers,
these earth creatures seem intelligent, and yet as a species they are so
malleable that many of them can be easily convinced that their lot in life is
to accept slave wages for performing tasks that truly need to be accomplished, thus
guaranteeing a lifetime of poverty. The whole American economic system has come
to depend upon a foundation of indentured slave-wage workers for a wide variety
of goods and services absolutely necessary for the success of those considered
the upper class.

“Ant species on the earth
also attack and enslave other species, but the ingenious method of the human employers
is that they use the psychological vulnerability of their targets to get them
to subjugate themselves in the name of freedom.
Worse, the poor souls even vote to ensure their own continued subservience
because they would prefer to think of themselves as free rather than accept the reality of their situation.

“Now, it must be said
that many of these employer types do improve the lives of their employees, even
making some of them wealthy. But the overall economic system exponentially
favors advantage, bleeding equity in favor of the already rich. For the so-called
job creators, though, as hard as it is to believe from a galactic perspective, the
stingy employer strategy is sheer parasiticalgenius.

“Still, as we know from our
space travels elsewhere, truly intelligent species do not confuse success with
a process that threatens the very sustainably of their long-term existence.”